I think this is where some of the confusion and defensiveness in the thread is coming from.

Within the german shepherd breed, regardless of color, you have a wide variety of lines with different phenotypes, drive, temperament, health, etc.

For some reason white coated shepherds are being lumped into one entire "type". As in, American showlines, German highlines, working bred (which has a whole bunch of different subsets within it), pet bred, and white shepherds.

There's just as much variation among white coated shepherds as there is within the colored ones. They don't all belong to the same type, and that typing is what people who work with them seriously take offense at.

Well yes and no.

wGSDs are sort of their own "type" of GSD. They have been selected as pets for a very long time and that has shaped what you generally see in wGSDs. Unplanned wGSD puppies born into litters of standard colored parents are a rare occurrence because they have been heavily selected against for so long by working and show breeders alike. They are much less common than dilutes (livers or blues) being born to standard colored parents.

Because whites were so heavily selected against, the largest remaining population of them was the pet bred dogs. In general, that is the foundation for even the well bred wGSDs we have today. Many of the people who are serious about wGSDs took the pet bred dogs and crossed them to American showline dogs to improve the quality. Some seem to have just aimed to improve on what they had with the pet lines without adding Amlines, that seems to be the case with Hoofprint. The wGSD breed clubs are, like GSDCA rather conformation oriented. So the well bred whites tend to be "show bred" with occasional rare exceptions. There is nothing wrong with that (I have a 14 year old show bred black and tan American line GSD) but it is what it is.